articles

Articles

Distilled pieces drawn from the data in the longer Analysis work. One argument each, the numbers that carry it, no filler. RSS.

Articles Jul 17, 2026

Unstable Legion: the peer-to-peer ChatGPT

Unstable Legion is a peer-to-peer ChatGPT: one language model cut into layer-stages that run in ordinary web browsers and hand work to each other over the Codec wire, with no data center in the loop. Open a tab, chat, and optionally donate your GPU to host a few layers. The pipeline assembles itself across whoever is online and keeps generating as peers come and go. It is early and experimental, and it runs today at legion.codecai.net. Here is how it works, what is proven, and where it is headed.

codec
legion
mesh-inference

Articles Jul 4, 2026

A Declaration of Independence

Every Fourth of July celebrates an independence most of us have quietly traded back, one subscription at a time. The cloud that holds your files, your photos, your mail, and now your AI is not a service you own; it is a landlord who rents you access to your own life. This is the account of moving all of it into my own house, need by need, what it actually cost, and why the technology sold as the ultimate instrument of control turned out to be the shortest road back to independence. You do not need permission to leave.

ai
self-hosting
foss

Articles Jun 30, 2026

Skills don't solve problems

Companies are bolting retrieval systems onto their AI stacks to stop the model reinventing the same code on every request. The cheap version is older than the expensive one: keep a small library of the deterministic things you already solved, and let the model recall a proven tool instead of gambling on a fresh one. A skill is a prompt. A recalled tool is a guarantee.

ai
software-development
architecture

Articles Jun 5, 2026

Anagnorisis

A computer-science look at the recognitions you cannot be taught, only earn: the patterns and tools whose purpose stays invisible until scale or time forces it. Idempotency, eventual consistency, the index, the interface, and the exact moment each one finally makes sense. Plus why AI is quietly removing the loop that produces that understanding.

ai
software-development
craft

Articles Jun 5, 2026

Cheaper tokens, bigger bills

AI keeps getting cheaper, the bills keep getting bigger, and the build-out still cannot earn itself back. Why falling token prices squeeze the companies that paid for the data centers instead of saving them.

ai-infrastructure
pricing
economics

Articles Jun 5, 2026

Priced for rescue

The AI-infrastructure bet is rational even if AI underdelivers, because of two doors most coverage never connects. The front door is index construction, the machinery now being loosened to load the public into mega-bets like SpaceX. The back door is the documented federal pattern of socializing losses. Private gains, socialized losses, priced into the return math before the bet is placed.

ai-infrastructure
moral-hazard
index-funds

Articles Jun 5, 2026

The Stenographic Mediator

The thing AI makes possible that Agile could only promise: a silent intermediary that sits between every expert in a software organization, translates each one's dialect, shows each only the concerns that touch them, and lets a unit of work clear every reviewer in parallel instead of through a chain of meetings. Plus the part no one else is building, a pipeline that turns juniors into seniors on purpose.

ai
software-development
architecture

Articles Jun 4, 2026

Arming both sides

NVIDIA earns $58 billion in a quarter selling the chips that fund the cloud, and now sells the laptop chips that obsolete it. The one company guaranteed to win the AI buildout is the one underwriting both sides of the trade.

nvidia
ai-infrastructure
semiconductors

Articles May 18, 2026

The envelope tax

Every time anyone uses AI, the cloud converts the model's native numbers into text, wraps them in web packaging, and ships the bundle to a reader who is usually another machine that throws the packaging away. It costs the industry $400 million a year and rising, strains the same grids and water tables the data-center boom already strains, and prices billions of people out of AI entirely. The fix is small.

codec
ai-infrastructure
wire-protocol

Articles May 5, 2026

Documentation is beating your AI stack

Companies are spending heavily to give AI architectural awareness: vector embeddings, semantic search, retrieval pipelines. Good engineering already solved most of it. Put the context next to the code, and let your rules point upstream, and the model honors your architecture with no retrieval system at all. A consolidation of the inline-documentation and defined-contract pieces.

ai
software-development
documentation

Articles Apr 19, 2026

We stopped teaching one expressive skill and replaced it with a deliberately throttled one

We replaced cursive with typing, but never questioned the 1870s QWERTY layout we teach on. Now the machine on the other side of the keyboard is AI, and the throughput and precision with which we express ourselves to it will define a professional ceiling. The case for taking stenography seriously.

education
ai
stenography

Articles Apr 18, 2026

AI development is a communication problem, and it always was

AI does not solve software's oldest problem, the degradation of intent as it passes from stakeholder to product manager to developer. It inherits it, and executes the inherited misunderstanding at a speed and scale no human team ever could. The first in a series on communicating with AI as a practitioner.

ai
software-development
communication

Articles Feb 24, 2026

The Original Sin of AI

Ken Thompson's 1984 'Trusting Trust' attack, updated for the age of AI coding assistants and model distillation: how hidden flaws can propagate across generations of models, why they are harder to detect than Thompson's compiler backdoor, and what regulators and engineers can do about it.

ai-safety
security
distillation